What are you willing to do?

James Meek, 26 May 2022

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them 
by Barbara F. Walter.
Viking, 289 pp., £18.99, January 2022, 978 0 241 42975 4
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... conspiracists and militiamen, according to Walter, that the next American civil war will come, as home-grown bands of right-wing terrorists and xenophobic guerrillas infest the democratic liberal order of the United States. This scenario doesn’t allow space for an alternative fracture in society’s representation of reality, one that is possibly more ...
... for Ireland, the country of his grandparents. Ireland, he felt, could injureEngland less with [Home Rule] than she does without it … She seems to me an example of a country more emancipated from every bond, not only of despotism but of ordinary law, than any so-called civilised country was before – a country revelling in odious forms of ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... can treat the patient for £1600, it keeps the difference. The incentive to send the patient home as soon as possible is high. Under the new system, state money will ‘follow the patient’ wherever the patient chooses to take it, even when that is outside the NHS. Patients with chronic conditions like diabetes will increasingly be given, not ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... the very odd discussion in which we in the US are engaged today. One of them, Justice Potter Stewart, held that Furman’s punishment would be ‘cruel and unusual’ as a matter of statistical observation: to find oneself the one man to be executed out of several thousand who were eligible was ‘cruel and unusual’ in the same sense as ‘being struck ...

Did I invade? Do you exist?

James Meek, 6 January 2022

... During the Tokyo Olympics, his agents tried to force a Belarusian sprinter to board a flight home after she criticised the state sports regime; she preferred to take refuge in Poland.The EU and the US responded with sanctions, and by withdrawing recognition of Lukashenko as president. More dependent than ever economically on Russia, Lukashenko felt he ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... himself arrived at the Front with the Lancashire Fusiliers in July 1916, and was sent home that November with trench fever. While he was convalescing he bought a notebook, and labelled it ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. He completed his first story in it, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, in 1917. A version of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ would eventually ...